Chapter 5
I didn’t know how long I’d been in the cell.
Days, probably. Maybe longer. There was no light down here except for the blue strips along the floor, and those never changed no matter the hour. The engines hummed. Everything ached.
At some point the ship had landed. I’d felt the shudder and the settling, then the engines dropping to a low idle that I could feel through the floor. But nobody came. Not for a while. I stayed in my corner with my knees pulled up and waited for whatever came next.
Ronan tried to talk to me a few times. I answered in single words or not at all. He stopped pushing.
When the door finally opened, it was the woman.
She came down the stairs fast, and she had shackles in one hand. Heavy iron with a chain between them. She opened Ronan’s cell first. I heard the click of the lock and the rattle of chain as the cuffs cinched around his wrists. Then mine.
“Hands,” she said.
I held them out. The left one, anyway. The right was swollen to twice its normal size, the knuckles purple-black and the fingers frozen in a half-curl that I couldn’t straighten.
She looked at it for about half a second, then clamped the shackle over my wrist anyway.
The iron bit into the swelling and I made a sound, not a scream, just a short, strangled thing that I swallowed before it finished leaving my throat.
She didn’t care. She was already pulling me toward the stairs.
The ship’s interior passed in a blur of corridors and rust, then the ramp, and then light. Real light, actual sunlight, so bright and so hot it hit me like stepping into an open furnace.
The Sept.
Two suns beat me the moment I reached the outside.
Ronan had mentioned that but hearing it and experiencing it were different things entirely.
They hung in the sky side by side, one larger than the other, both blazing white-yellow against a sky that was less blue and more a washed-out, hazy tan.
The heat was immediate and total. It pressed down on me and seared through the thin fabric of my clothes, and within seconds sweat was running down my back and into the waistband of my pants.
The ship had landed on a stretch of flat, cracked desert that extended in every direction before terminating at the walls of a city.
And city was a generous word. It was a sprawl of low, sand-colored buildings packed tight together, some with domed roofs, some flat-topped, all of them bleached and battered by the twin suns until they looked like they’d grown out of the ground rather than been built on it.
Towers rose at irregular intervals, thin and crooked, strung with cables and banners that snapped in a hot wind that carried grit and the smell of animals.
They marched us toward it. The wild woman in front, two of the captain’s men behind, Ronan beside me with his shackles clinking. My feet sank into the sand with every step. My vision swam from the heat and the fact that I hadn’t eaten in however many days I’d been in that cell.
“You okay?” Ronan asked. Quiet, under his breath.
“I’m fine. Thank you.” I kept my eyes forward. “Don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself.”
“You can barely walk.”
“I said I’m fine.”
He didn’t push it, but I felt him adjust his pace to stay close. I hated that. I hated that a stranger was showing me more concern than the two people I’d loved most in the world, and I hated that the comparison even crossed my mind.
We entered the city through an archway carved from pale stone.
The streets were narrow, packed earth and sand, crowded with bodies.
Human and alien, moving in every direction, pressed shoulder to shoulder in a chaos of sound and color that my brain couldn’t process fast enough.
Vendors shouted from stalls draped in fabric, selling cuts of meat in colors I’d never seen and jars of liquid that glowed faintly in the shade.
A man and a woman screamed at each other in a language I didn’t speak, their argument spilling into the street while a child dodged between their legs.
A creature with too many arms and skin like dried clay sat on a stool outside a shop, methodically polishing a metallic ball.
Aliens. Real aliens, standing three feet from me, going about their lives.
On Krackus, it had been humans and machines.
If there were aliens on that planet, I never knew about it.
They’d kept us sealed off from the wider universe, just smart enough to work, just ignorant enough not to ask questions.
I should have been awed. This was the most life I’d ever seen in one place, the most color and noise. But I was being marched through this city in chains toward a place where I’d be sold like an animal. So I kept my head down and I walked.
The Market Square opened up ahead of us.
I heard it before I saw it, a roar of voices, layered and overlapping, rising and falling in waves. It sounded like a stadium. It sounded like a riot. When we turned the corner and the square spread out in front of me, I understood why.
It was massive. An open plaza ringed by tiered seating that rose up on all sides, packed with hundreds of bodies, maybe thousands, aliens and humans crowded together on stone benches and standing in the aisles.
At the center of the plaza sat a raised platform, a stage made of pale stone worn smooth by use, and on that stage—
A human woman with dirty red hair stood in shackles while an alien with a voice like grinding metal shouted numbers to the crowd.
She was shaking. Her eyes were wide and glassy, darting from face to face in the crowd, looking for any sign that someone in this stadium saw her as a person and not a product.
Nobody did.
The bidding erupted. Voices from every corner, shouting over each other, the auctioneer pointing and slamming a staff against the stage floor.
A tall, spindly alien near the front rose and barked a number that silenced the others.
The auctioneer slammed the staff again. Done.
The woman was led off the stage by a handler, and the spindly alien met them at the bottom of the steps.
I watched it grip her arm and steer her into the crowd.
She didn’t fight. She didn’t scream. She just went, like the last part of her that might have resisted had burned out somewhere between the shackles and the bidding.
Another body replaced her on the stage. Then another. The process repeated, the shouting and the slam of the staff and the handler leading the sold merchandise away. Efficient. Routine.
When the wild woman shoved me toward the stage, my legs almost gave out.
I climbed the steps because there was nothing else to do.
My shackles clinked against the stone. The auctioneer grabbed my jaw and turned my head left, then right, displaying me to the crowd.
His fingers were rough and he smelled like sulfuric sweat.
Then he pried my mouth open, just jammed his thumb behind my teeth and pulled, and held it there so the front rows could inspect me.
I stood there with my mouth held open by a stranger’s hand and hundreds of alien eyes cataloging every part of me, and I felt something I hadn’t felt yet through all of the grief and the pain. I’d felt sad. I’d felt ready to die.
I’d never felt less than human before.
They graded me against some internal checklist. The auctioneer released my jaw and called a number—“Two hundred saffers!”—and the crowd stirred.
The bidding started slow. A few voices, testing.
The auctioneer pointed and called. An alien in the third row stood and shouted a number.
Another countered from the far side. A human man near the front, well-dressed and bored looking, raised a hand.
The numbers climbed. Three hundred. Four hundred.
I stood on that stage and watched strangers arguing over the price of my body and I couldn’t feel my hands anymore.
Not the broken one, not the good one. Just numb.
A buyer in the front row motioned to the auctioneer.
He was a squat, gray-skinned alien with wide-set eyes and a mouth full of flat, blunt teeth.
The auctioneer nodded and the alien climbed the steps onto the stage.
He walked a circle around me. Grabbed my arm and squeezed the muscle, then lifted my lip to look at my teeth again.
Pinched the skin on the back of my good hand and watched how fast it snapped back.
I stared straight ahead. I didn’t flinch.
I didn’t do anything, because I’d hollowed out days ago and there was nothing in me capable of reacting anymore.
I was a body on a stage being touched by a stranger, and whoever won the bidding would own that body, and whatever happened after that was out of my hands in every possible sense.
The squat alien grunted, satisfied. Stepped off the stage. Called a number.
“Five hundred saffers!” the auctioneer bellowed.
Then someone screamed.
Not on the stage. In the crowd. A voice near the back of the plaza, high and sharp, and then another, and then a ripple of movement that spread outward from the rear entrance as heads turned and the noise in the square changed pitch.
The bidding stalled. The auctioneer paused, staff raised, squinting toward the disturbance.
I followed his gaze.
Something was descending from the sky.